Mark Slouka Quotes

Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.

Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.

It’s a race between your foolishness and your allotted days. Good luck.

Maybe I lacked coping skills. Maybe I was weak. I cared for people for no better reason than they seemed to care for me, acknowledge me. It didn’t seem so dangerous at the time.

Consider it: Who but God could have dreamed a tale so absurd and so heartless?

Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning.

I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys.

...like a small stone deflected off a larger one, my brother had spun off toward the Almighty, though to my mind the events of that morning could just as well have cast him the other way.

The only thing your life teaches you is how to live your life. And that’s only if you’re very lucky. And you listen very hard.

I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do something about it if at all possible.

I suspect that on some level, life is a matter of indefensible loyalties.

Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.

We're angry about this, upset about that, but who has the time to do anything anymore? There are those reports to report on, memos to remember, e-mails to deflect or delete. They bury us like snow.